Tie Location-based Check-ins to Sales

If one of the goals of your location-based marketing program is an increase in sales (whose isn’t), then you must determine a way to tie the check-in to sales.

There are ways to directly connect your check-ins to sales, such as feeding your location-based data directly into your CRM system, but if that becomes too much of a challenge, there are other ways.

For instance, you can spot survey your customers post sales to ask if they checked-in. Spot surveying won’t give you an exact number but it does give you a good idea as to which of your customers are checking in and what the sales totals are.

To tie your campaign to a boost in sales, you have to take pre-campaign and post-campaign snapshots of your foot traffic.

If you can demonstrate a post-launch lift in traffic, and you know what an average customer spends, you can start to make an explicit connection to sales. There may be other external factors involved, so data here will be more directional than concrete, but it will give you an indication of whether your efforts are paying off — even if it’s slow.

If you don’t have a CRM system that measures the impact of an LBS campaign on sales or the ability to do A/B testing, consider qualitative analysis. This is a fancy way of saying, survey your customers and ask them if the LBS campaign made an impact.

While this isn’t the most accurate way of finding out how effective your campaign is, it should give you an idea of whether your campaign is a success. Hand out surveys in your store, hand out postcards with links to a survey (companies like Survey Monkey offer free online surveys) or e-mail your customer base.